What is a Talent Management Dashboard? 5 Critical Components

As an HR professional, a talent management dashboard (TMD) can be an important tool to understand your workforce and plan for the future. This can be quite a challenge with today’s ever-changing workforce. Time to have a closer look at the talent management dashboard: functions, examples, and a how-to.

What is a Talent Management Dashboard?

A talent management dashboard is a customizable workforce reporting tool that helps recruiters and hiring managers to create an effective selection and treatment of talent.

A talent management dashboard relies on five pillars: Recruitment, performance management, succession planning, learning & development and compensation management. Taken together, these pillars form the talent lifecycle.

Based on the information from each of these pillars, HR professionals get a comprehensive overview of their talent pool. This enables them to communicate with and nurture their talent in order to plan for the future.

5 Functions of a Talent Management Dashboard

Although this is by no means an exhaustive list, a typical talent management dashboard has the following functions:
1. Reporting. A talent management dashboard provides first and foremost an overview of the talent pipeline, starting with recruitment and ending with outflow.

2. PerformanceManagement. Measuring employee performance is useful not only to make the most out of your employees’ skills and competencies but also to use as a basis for finding and selecting new talent.

3. Engagewithtalent. A talent management dashboard gives you all the supporting data and information you need to start a discussion with your employees about their career growth, development opportunities, and training needs. An example is the talent 9 box grid, which assesses potential and performance.

In this grid, you see on the Y-axis the performance reviews, ranging from ‘exceeds expectations’ to ‘below expectations’. On the X axis, you see the growth potential, ranging from ‘limited capacity’ to ‘motivated, willing and capacity to grow’. This grid helps to assess the quality of the workforce and is also useful in other fields, such as learning and development.

4. Learninganddevelopment. Depending on someone’s position in the potential and performance grid, different learning and development opportunities can be offered. People who are motivated and have a capacity to grow can be put on a fast track to management positions. These are the people you want to send to management training. This does not hold true for the people who perform well but don’t have much growth potential. They are better off focusing on on-the-job training which helps them to do their current job well.

5. TalentPipeline. Because you know your star players and their potential, you can build a talent pipeline. As a guideline, you want to have a replacement plan for the top .5 % of functions in your organization. In case someone leaves, you should have multiple people lined up who are able – and willing – to perform the new job. A talent management dashboard helps to provide the information you need to ace your succession planning.

In the end, a TMD provides an overview of the key human capital of the organization and enables HR to optimize their deployment through talent management practices.

Talent Management Dashboard Examples

Now, what does this look like? Below you’ll find a few talent management dashboard examples, but since they’re customizable the options are endless (all data is of course fictitious).

How to create a Talent Management Dashboard

Alright, so how do you go about setting up a TMD? First of all, you’ll need to decide which talent management metrics you want to use. The list of potential metrics is endless, but when it comes to the 5 pillars a talent management dashboard relies on you can think of the following ones for example:

Education level

Function type

FTE (Full-Time Equivalent)

Turnover

New hires

Absence rate

Cost of absence

Training cost

Performance ratings

Potential ratings

Again, this is by no means an exhaustive list. The talent management metrics you choose will be displayed on your TMD and as such provide you with an easy-to-read, real-time user interface that shows you a graphical presentation of the current status and historical trends of your organization’s KPI’s.

More about these talent management metrics in one of our upcoming posts, subscribe to stay up-to-date!

Author: Neelie Verlinden

Neelie Verlinden is the Co-Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Digital HR Tech. She’s an experienced digital HR & HR Tech writer, speaker, and entrepreneur with an international background. She has written countless articles on all things HR technology.